Industry News

I’ve covered “root cause” thinking in incident reviews before, and Lorin Hochstein takes aim at a related issue: AWS’s “Correction of Error” terminology:

I hate the term “Correction of Error” because it implies that incidents occur as a result of errors. As a consequence, it suggests that the function of a post-incident review process is to identify the errors that occurred and to fix them. I think this view of incidents is wrong, and dangerously so: It limits the benefits we can get out...

A quick post on LinkedIn about interviewing a candidate who used real-time AI got more engagement than is usual for me. And as often happens when something goes semi-viral, some folks took issue with what I said, so I want to expand on the point I was trying to make (it wasn’t that “AI is cheating”).

Here’s what I wrote:

I had my first experience interviewing a candidate who used real-time AI today. If you’re someone who uses AI daily, it’s so easy to spot. The pause before the answer,...

Anton Zaides wrote a good post about shadow work in engineering teams. He discovered a senior engineer on his team was spending over 40% of his time on work that didn’t show up anywhere—code reviews, mentoring, ad-hoc support fixes, etc.

This part is important:

The shadow backlog isn’t the problem—in my opinion, that’s probably the work that should have been done in the first place. The solution is to stop doing it under the table and make sure you have space for it. The more people...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

This week, we covered the doubly heated Google Search ranking volatility, but nothing was confirmed by Google. OpenAI will soon test ads in ChatGPT responses and they will charge on an impression basis...

As expected, but sooner than I thought, Google has brought Personal Intelligence to Google Search within AI Mode. This first launched last week in the Gemini app and is now rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in English in the U.S.

Google will sometimes fall back to showing featured snippets when it is unable to generate AI Overviews for a query. And when that happens, it sometimes looks like an AI Overview, but it is not an AI Overview, it is a featured snippet.

Google Ads currently has a bug where if you try to edit your asset groups within your Performance Max campaigns in the web user interface, it simply won't work. Google is reportedly aware of the issue and is telling advertisers to use Google Ads Editor or the API as a workaround for now.

Google's Gemini may be rolling out new local results, it may be new, I am not sure. But the details it shows may give you insight into how Google understands and interprets your business. Gemini gives new headlines and sections about your business based on what it thinks it knows about it.

For the past year or so, I've seen a growing number of complaints about Google Ads accounts being hijacked. It seems to be getting worse, even after we covered the Google Ads account hijacks last November. So how do you reduce the chances of your Google Ads account being hijacked?